A request for a night time noise permit at the 3rd Street Chick-fil-A restaurant got approved by Bloomington’s board of public works at its regular Tuesday meeting.
The noise permit is related to the planned installation of some awnings for the drive-thru area of the restaurant. The request came from the Georgia-based Horizon Construction Company. Georgia is also the national restaurant chain’s home state.
The calendar dates for the planned construction of the steel-framed shade structure run from July 21 through Aug. 24.
Horizon wants to be able to work between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. from Monday through Saturday, and all day on Sundays.
The request was made to allow Chick-fil-A to maintain its normal business hours, according to the board’s meeting information packet.
The board’s approval came with some concerns and caveats, which were discussed at the board’s Tuesday meeting.
Horizon’s Kyle Daniel described the heaviest noise impact as just one night of saw cutting and some demolition type work. “We’ll have a hammer and an excavator running to excavate for the footers,” Daniel said. The rest of the work would be “relatively low noise,” he said. DanielHe added, “I mean, as relatively low noise as construction can be—but it’s not any heavy equipment type operation.”
Board member Elizabeth Karon asked about making the approval conditional, in case there were complaints from local residents—neighborhoods immediately to the north or east.
Daniel, whose company does similar modifications to restaurants across the country, told the board they normally get complaints only when there is a residential structure right next to the restaurant. When a restaurant is located in a larger shopping center with no immediate residents, they normally don’t get complaints, he said.
Board chair Kyla Cox Deckard had a concern different from the noise per se. She called the granting of a night time noise permit for a private construction project “unusual.” Cox Deckard said in most cases, an overnight construction permit affects a roadway or a public utility of some kind—something that is happening in the public right-of-way. And in those cases what is being weighed is thousands of people traveling on a roadway, she said.
An example of the kind of permit Cox Deckard was talking about was for night time work on 3rd Street and SR 46 by E&B Paving, which was granted by the board in early 2020.
Some back-and-forth between public works director Adam Wason and assistant city attorney Jacquelyn Moore led to the conclusion that the board could authorize Wason to respond in a timely way to any complaints.
Wason will be able to modify the noise permit, without presenting the modification to the board at a meeting.
Both Karon and Cox Deckard voted yes.
The three-member board of works has one vacancy, which has not yet been filled, after the resignation of long-time board member Beth Hollingsworth, which came a couple of weeks ago.
Originally on the board’s Tuesday agenda was the appeal of an excessive growth citation—it involved bamboo growing taller than 8 inches. But the appeal did not appear on the agenda used by the board on Tuesday. That item could still return to the board’s meeting agenda two weeks from now, Wason told The B Square.